zennurse @ 35

I am utterly disgusted with Stark and have not felt this disheartened in a year.

No wonder we are shredding the Constitution and letting Bush head us into war.

Appalling.

what did stark do?

He told the truth in public.

Apparently the House members rebuked Nancy for calling for that censure. Good on ‘em! Nancy is supposedly their leader, not their master. Gosh, I wonder what has gotten into her.

OT–Apologies, but this is just too inane:

Filed at 12:18 p.m. ET

GREENWOOD, S.C. (AP) — In a slip of the tongue, Republican Mitt Romney accused Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama of urging terrorists to congregate in Iraq.

In the midst of criticizing Obama and other Democrats on foreign and economic policy Tuesday, the GOP presidential hopeful said:

”Actually, just look at what Osam — Barack Obama — said just yesterday. Barack Obama, calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. That is the battlefield. … It’s almost as if the Democratic contenders for president are living in fantasyland. Their idea for jihad is to retreat, and their idea for the economy is to also retreat. And in my view, both efforts are wrongheaded.”

Romney apparently was referring to an audiotape aired Monday in which a speaker believed to be terrorist Osama bin Laden called for insurgents in Iraq to unite and avoid divisions. The authenticity of the tape aired on Al-Jazeera television could not be immediately confirmed.

If that’s all it would take to derail an Obama general election campaign (and I’ve been saying that for some time), then Obama is unelectable and his supporters should come to their senses and switch to some other candidate.

I suggest they look at Edwards since Obama has been reading his speeches for some time. If they like the rhetoric maybe they’d like the man who wrote those speeches.

John Edwards — Leadership for Obama supporters!

Or something like that – it was hard to follow with all the twitching, blinking, jerking and references to the “homeland”

It’s creepy just listening to the “debate” as if there could be such a thing.

Tying to Jeralyn’s post – the simple reason that Mukasey will not say waterboarding is torture is that we have done it. If he is on the record saying it is torture and illegal, then a) Bush will likely withdraw his nomination bc Bush will never appoint anyone who would say that, but if he doesn’t withdraw, b) there is an immediate conflict with the PUBLIC Executive Order that states nothing illegal can be classified and c) there are now all kinds of persons who have actual knowledge of the commission of criminal behaviour (and its authorization at the highest levels) and who will be part of a conspiracy if they don’t come forward.

So even simply saying he thinks waterboarding is torture sets into motion many irreversible things and they are things that not only Bush wants to avoid, but members of Congress – most importantly including DEMOCRATS – want to avoid as well.

Because then you have the situation of either pursuing the crimes – which Democrats like Nancy Pelosi do not want to see happen – or even further (as if it could happen) degrading the DOJ by allowing all the known and publically admitted torture crimes to go unpursued as a matter of policy.

The fix is in. Mukasey is going to go in, run things “better” (probably by some ‘no uncertain language’ explanations of no MORE torture on his watch) and exercise his “discretion” to let off everyone to date under the Nuremberg Defense theory that they were just following orders, and let off those who gave the orders as well, but not going “there” anymore on his watch.

Bc, of course, that always works. Allowing torture and kidnap and sexually deviant anal and other violations and disappearing of people, including very young children – but making sure you go “tsk tsk” at some point in your cover up.

It’s all too sad to contemplate – what this country has become. And I watched a small portion of Hayden on Rose last night and got physically ill.

Everyone who works(ed) for any of them – Gonzales, Bush, Cheney, Mueller, Hayden, Tenet, etc. – and kept working after the first torture memo was revealed is without shame and without soul.

What makes it all even more mind boggling is the jury selection process. If I have read reports of this case correctly, the prosecution knew going in that they would have to sell this theory and so they were allowed to EXCLUDE from the jury pool, for cause, anyone who said that they would not convict someone who only supplied humanitarian aid of supporting terrorism.

So suddenly, instead of a representative community, you have one that is skewed to include only persons who believe that supplying humanitarian aid can be support of terrorism – actualy and not metaphorical.

So it is from THAT pool that these decisions were rendered.

And it was with the approaches established by Fitzgerald in his Salah case of using identity cloaked anonymous sourcing – - so we now have even more veneer added to that theory when it comes into play for GITMO trials.

*sigh*

Meanwhile, other parts of DOJ are doing the Lord’s work by spending thousands of manhours and going into millions of dollars going after a Democratic coroner for sending personal faxes and a Democratic Southern black state senator’s daughter for having $700.00 in unreported income.

All while supporting torture and, with the disappearing of KSMs children, keeping the “kid” in “kidnap”

I’ve always been a pretty law and order person, but these days just hearing the words, “Deparment of Justice” makes you want to take a hot shower with antibacterials.

Becca Morn @ 79

Any competent, ethical jurist or attorney knows full well that the interrogation techniques approved by the White House simply ARE torture.

Just as they also know that the Justice Department’s been up to its eyeballs providing memoranda saying that what they’re doing is legal. Only their whole argument can always be summed up as “Because we say it is.”

Only it isn’t. The White House simply can’t nominate anybody with ethics or morals — the Hobson’s Choice is to commit word-twisting legalistic perjury to Congress or else provide testimony establishing that yes, the White House has engaged in impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors”.

So they won’t nominate anybody who won’t lie for them. Who won’t say that what they’re doing has been legal all along.

And then one day, some GOP congressman will submit a bill that declares everything the Bush administration has done “in the name of the GWOT” to have been retroactively legal.

Even when it wasn’t.

The thing is, I used to do interrogations in connection with mafia investigations. The ONLY way it works is if you convice the the witness that he is better off siding with you than in siding with the bad guys.

That is true of witnesses who are bad guys and witnesses who just don’t want to piss off bad guys for fear of retribution. You have to give the witness a reason to have confidence in you as their protector.

How does torture accomplish that?

It doesn’t. Torture is act of unmitigated evil. And I am deeply ashamed to be an American whose country has engaged in such acts — not just once or twice, but as a matter of national policy.

And so these evil men continue to claim that that which is done in our names is not torture. That it is somehow necessary — and yet they never manage to show that it is. There’s never any accurate information or “actionable intelligence” to use their twisted terminology.

Just people — humans — who will scream and confess to anything, to make the pain and fear stop.

It’s beyond sad. It’s a disease, a malignancy upon a once decent nation.

I still have to keep shaking myself, to realize that this really is what’s become of a place that once put great stock in freedom, decency, and accountability. The trouble is, what I’m seeing from the Democratic party members we worked so hard to elect the last cycle — is that they still don’t get it.

Eric was just convicted by a jury based on info from the paid FBI informant (Anna the “street medic”) who provided the house, money, vehicle, and other material support for their activities.

Entrapment?

When interviewed by Eric’s attorney after the verdict, the jurors reported they did not trust anything the FBI informant said that could not be independently corroborated.

The jurors also stated they would have voted to acquit save for a single contested answer (during deliberations) from the trial judge.

After the jury issued their verdict, Mark conducted informal jury interviews and it became clear how pivotal these instructions were in the jury’s decision to convict. All twelve jurors told Mark they would have acquitted Eric if they had been instructed that “first contact” meant August of 2004, when Eric and Anna first met. The jurors told Mark very openly and clearly that there was a lot of crying in the jury room because they did not want to convict Eric, but that they felt totally obligated to do so once they were instructed that the only relevant time period for
evidence was after Eric agreed to the conspiracy with Anna. When Mark told them what his view of the law was, they all agreed they would have acquitted in an hour after the deliberations had begun on Tuesday. One of the jurors was so emotional she could not stay and talk, but when leaving, went right up to the TV News 10 cameraman and gave an on air live interview (which was shown repeatedly on tv) where she stated that the FBI should be embarrassed of themselves for what they did in this case, that they should be ashamed, but they had found that Eric was predisposed based upon the law they received. The majority of the jurors said that they
thought Anna was a liar and they didn’t believe anything she said unless it was on tape. They were disgusted and appalled at the FBI, and told them so to their faces.

The sad thing is that as Digby says, Stark’s being ritually humiliated for speaking the truth will not stop the Republicans and their media toadies from using this to distract from SCHIP and torture and everything else.

But what it WILL do is serve as Nancy’s “object lesson” for anyone else who has the temerity to stick his head up and make any noise that doesn’t go along with Mrs. Pelosi’s script.
Shame on her.
No one else gets to be a leader in that sandpile, I guess.

From the NYT:

“Mr. Rockefeller’s office said Monday that the sharp increases in contributions from the telecommunications executives had no influence on his support for the immunity provision.

“Any suggestion that Senator Rockefeller would make policy decisions based on campaign contributions is patently false,” Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for him, said. “He made his decision to support limited immunity based on the Intelligence Committee’s careful review of the situation and our national security interests.”

Yeah, that and the opportunity to fuck his Democratic colleagues in the Judiciary Committee.

Then he should return them, all of them that have occurred in his tenure in the Senate (retrospectively)…and never take a penny from them in the future. That would remove the blot from his reputation.